HELP! Inspired Tapered vs Inspired Arcade fork

So after breaking a fork in 3 months I'm looking for something stronger. Narrowed it down to either the steel Arcade fork or the aluminum "Fourplay" fork. I'm looking on a straight out strength basis. I know conventional wisdom says the steel fork but I also know that they have put a lot of effort to make that aluminum fork strong. So which one is actually stronger? Thanks for help!

Apples to apples the steel fork is stronger. The welds are stronger and steel is more resistant to fatigue. The only down side is the Arcade fork weighs about twice as much as ANY aluminum fork. Oh and the Arcade fork has a really poorly designed 15mm thru axle.

In what way is it "poorly designed" out of interest? We tried a couple of different dropout styles and this one was the simplest/easiest to use. Through Inspired and TartyBikes I haven't heard of people having issues with it or it being a problem, so if you've got some feedback on any negative points it'd be good to hear them

Biggest issue in deciding which fork to go for is what your frame is capable of taking. If you've got a tapered headtube then it'd be worth going for the Tapered fork rather than faffing with reducers and stuff like that. If you've got a regular 1 1/8" head tube then you would need to go for the Arcade forks out of those two.

You can run the Hope Type H style cup to allow the use of a tapered fork in a regular internal HT frame, but I'm not sure I'd personally want to mess with the geo of my bike that much.

Hi Mark. OK, I'll give 3 examples below. The first is the 15mm axle design that is used on thousands and thousands of mountain bikes and needs no further validation as to it's strength and simplicity. One side of the fork dropout is threaded and the axle simply threads into it. Simple. The cons of this design are that it's not reversible and an expensive part (the fork) is threaded and is therefore susceptible to being stripped. But again, used on thousands and thousands of MTBs.

The 2nd example is the current Echo/Czar thru axle. The dropouts are larger than necessary and both sides are unthreaded holes. The axle is 4 separate pieces, but it's reversible and if you strip the threads you only need to replace the axle (only replaceable through Echo though). Most of the time you can thread this one with one tool, but ideally you'd need 2 tools to tighten it; Echo uses 2 different sized allens so you don't have to carry 2 of the same tool.

The 3rd example is the gen3 Arcade fork. This axle is 3 separate parts and only replaceable by Inspired. This axle is reversible and there's no fork threads to strip. The fork dropouts have cutouts so that an older 9mm/10mm hub can be used in lieu of the 15mm thru axle, but you need adapters for the fork for that to work and honestly if you're upgrading to an Arcade you should upgrade to a 15mm hub. Also, like the Echo, you need 2 tools to tighten this axle properly and for some reason Inspired uses to same tool (5mm allen key) for both sides so you'll need to bring 2 of the same tool out riding.

Maybe you need to use more grease on your Arcade axle? I don't think I've ever needed 2 allen keys to tighten or loosen mine, apart from on the very first prototype which was non-tapered and just had a flat dropout face/underside of the head of the axle. That's when using my own bike, but also when assembling them for TB/Inspired.

The reason the forks have the option for a QR or 9/10mm axle hub is that they were being used on Arcade and Console completes so needed to have the scope to use a conventional bolt-in hub, but also because people were requesting it. I know a couple of riders who opted for it because they wanted to use a non-15mm through hub, wanted a QR skewer and stuff like that - the slots aren't detrimental to the performance if you want to use a 15mm axle, but do open things up a bit (pun intended, not scared) if you want to try a different axle out.

That is partially the reason that they didn't go down the threaded drop-out route, but the other part was that - as you mentioned - the fork is the expensive part so it'd be best to avoid people being able to kill that if possible. That's also why the other Inspired axle setups avoid using threaded dropouts on the frame/fork.

It's true the axle is only replaceable by Inspired, but a friend of mine is still riding the first tapered head axle prototype Inspired made back in 2012 and it's going fine. They don't break, and as you can get them with the forks it being a proprietary setup doesn't seem like that big a deal?

Sorry for going into detail and stuff, was just curious about the "poorly designed" comment as quite a lot of time went into deciding what to do and how to do it.